City of Escondido Surrenders on Its Immigrant Ordinance

The housing ordinance the Escondido City Council passed in October to make it unlawful to rent to illegal immigrants is dead. A month after it was passed, a lawsuit was filed challenging its constitutionality. At a closed meeting last night, the council agreed to end all litigation and permanently keep the city from enforcing the ordinance, which would have severely penalized landlords for renting to undocumented immigrants. Two Escondido landlords, two illegal immigrants living in the city and the Escondido Human Rights Coalition filed suit Nov. 3. The ordinance had been scheduled to go into effect Nov. 17, but a judge put it on hold and sided with the challengers in a series of preliminary rulings last month. In a statement released at 8:30 p.m. yesterday, the city said, “Continuing the present policy approach would be unnecessarily costly to the city, and unnecessarily consume the court’s time, when other approaches could provide the answers to the problems more efficiently.”

Click here for the story.  Click here for the City of Escondido’s official explanation.

KJ